So, we’re finally getting around to defending ourselves against those infantile Apple ads which, let’s be frank, contain a lot of half-truths and outright lies.  However, they’ve gone unanswered and as Chris Matthews will tell you, if you leave a charge unanswered long enough, it becomes “truth”.

Here is our first “retort” to take back the argument over Microsoft products and what they will enable people to do.  It follows on the Mojave Experiment, where unassuming folks were shown a “new” Microsoft OS code-named “Mojave” and asked to compare it against what they thought Vista was like.  This was pretty smart as it showed how people have had their perceptions manipulated by Apple and others.

Forthwith:  Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld at the Shoe Store – our attempt at re-connecting with our audience.

Video: Shoe Circus

What do you think? Is this as clever as Mojave?  Does it set the stage for taking back our turf from Apple?

My blogging has decreased dramatically - I know!  I've a lot to catch up on, but I thought this would be a good tidbit to share with respect to my earlier post about not being able to browse my local IIS on my Vista laptop.

Well, after much digging, I discovered that the issue is related to my IPSec policies - somewhere, there's a conflict in the rules that the corp net pushes down to my machine when I connect to the network.

I "fixed" my problem by stopping the IPSec service.  Horrors!  Yes, I know.  Violating a bazillion policies, but dammit!  I want control of my machine!  It even held me up from launching my Virtual Server console.

I began to believe it wasn't a firewall issues and more in the IPSec direction after reviewing a few articles online and discovering that I could not ping the loopback adapter (127.0.0.1), but could ping external sites.

Lesson learned - word to the wise.  Now, it's a whole other matter on how I'm going to get the IPSec policies rationalized...

Update: This issue is definitely related to the corp desktop policy - I've noticed that while working at home, disconnected from the corp net, I can browse localhost without issue.

I've recently discovered a really, really, really annoying irritant with Vista Enterprise over the last couple of days.  Here's the scenario:  For the past while, I've been getting my new laptop configured for development - installing Visual Studio (2008, no problem - 2005 is missing a .CAB - WTF?), Subversion, add-ins, etc.

I also installed a personal wiki to keep track of dev projects, info, etc.  Sure, I could use OneNote for this, but it's just not very... developer-ish.

All was well, until yesterday morning when I discovered I could no longer browse http://localhost.  I was able to get functionality briefly restored by disabling User Account Control (stops pestering you for elevated access to do routine tasks), but then in about 15 minutes, I was out of luck again.

It appears that I'm not the only one having this issue.  Here's what I was able to dig up from the intarwebs:

Steve Schofield - Localhost Connection Issues List

I've tried just about everything.  Even removed and re-installed IIS7.  This means that I'll probably have a lot of fun getting Virtual Server to run the web admin panel, as well.

My suspicion is that it's somehow tied back to the group policy that IT has set for the laptops.  I'll report more when I figure this out...